Global Cancer

When we treat money as the most valuable thing in the world, that’s simply because we have collectively agreed to make it so. We forget that money is a social construct—a kind of group fantasy. The anthropologist Weston LaBarre called it a psychosis that has become normal, “an institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once.” As long as we keep dreaming together, it continues to work as the socially agreed-upon means that enables us to convert something (a day’s work, for example) into something else (bags of groceries, perhaps).

Yet as Midas reminds us, money can also become a curse. In more psychological terms, the danger is that means and ends become reversed, so that the means of life becomes the goal itself. As Arthur Schopenhauer put it, money is abstract happiness, so someone who is no longer capable of concrete happiness can set his heart on money. Money becomes “frozen desire”—not desire for anything in particular but a symbol for the satisfaction of desire in general. But what does the Buddha say about desire? Frozen or not, it remains the root cause of suffering.

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The goal of the system is to end up with more money than we started with, to turn whatever we touch to gold. Those who think like Midas rise to the top. Investors seek increasing returns in the form of dividends and higher share prices. This generalized expectation translates into an impersonal but constant demand for ever more profit and growth, a desire that can never be fully satisfied.

But who is responsible for this unrelenting emphasis on profitability and growth? That’s the point: we all participate —as workers, employers, consumers, investors and pensioners. The ultimate irony —or rather, tragedy— of this process is that everything that gives life value is devalued into a means for maximizing something that has no value whatsoever in itself. Everything becomes a means to making more money. “Everything” in this case includes the biosphere (resources), human life (labor), and society itself (we must continually adapt to the changing requirements of the economy).

Capitalism made more sense a couple centuries ago when the Earth seemed infinite and capital (money for investment) was relatively scarce. Today the obvious metaphor is cancer on a planetary scale. Cells become cancerous when they mutate into uncontrolled growth and spread throughout the body to disrupt its healthy functioning.

(From an interview with David Loy)